Monday, April 23, 2012

Sarah Manguso, The Guardians: An Elegy,

The problem with dying in private is that the
rest of us don’t get to watch it happen, and things that happen without us seem
less real, not quite finished, maybe even impossible.

If Harris had died slowly, under a beautiful
lace-trimmed coverlet, with stage four something or other, and if a yellow
light had been burning somewhere in a far corner of the room as we quietly
cried, and if everyone had had a chance to say goodbye or otherwise get to
narrate the end of the story, then maybe I could believe that Harris is better
off dead and freed from his torments.

After your friend throws himself in front of a
train, you tell the rest of your friends that you love them in case they all
throw themselves in front of trains before you have a chance to say it. Maybe
you’ve said it to them before, but you do it again, just in case, as if giving
them permission to forego the lace coverlet and to die as Harris actually
died—as if to say that with the lace coverlet, it would be easier.

In her fifth trade book, The Guardians: An Elegy (New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), American writer Sarah Manguso has achieved a rich and varied elegy to a friend who escaped a mental
hospital in 2008, and committed suicide by stepping in front of a train. The Guardians is a book that provides a shape to her late friend, and a shape
to her grief, writing out his illness and his health, their shared history of
intimacy, writing out a background of growing up, New York during and following
the 9/11 attacks, and the toll that mental illness takes.

One month after the attack, while I rode the
subway to the office of the New York Post for my first day of work on
the night shift, the United States and Britain launched air strikes in Afghanistan.

I didn’t work on the cover story, whose headline
was Tali-BAM!

I was assigned the article about the Franciscan
rite of the blessing of animals, which also happened that day. All the
depressed rescue dogs were brought to the church and taken up to the altar.

At St. Bartholomew’s, a bald eagle led the
procession, followed by the police and rescue dogs. The article accompanied a
picture of a bloodhound named Chase sitting at the altar to receive his
blessing, so I wrote the caption Heavenly Hound.

Six weeks after the attack, at the site no one
spoke. The crater was still smoldering, and its poison smell filled the air.
Some people wore gas masks and some didn’t. They walked among each other like
the uniformed members of opposing teams.

Some of the stores in the neighborhood were open
and clean. Others had been abandoned. Makeshift bars crossed a lingerie shop’s
broken windows, the panties in the vitrines scattered and covered with an inch
of fluffy gray dust. My black coat and shoes were gray, too. The fire trucks
drove the streets unwashed and covered with red names drawn in the dust with a
finger.

After the press conference when he was asked How
many? and he answered More than any of us can bear, the mayor
assumed the charisma of a movie star.

The fire burned until February, and by then the
Stars and Stripes had sprung up all over the city, a tri-color weed nourished
on ambient fear.

What appeals about all of Manguso’s prose is the
stripped-down clarity she projects, beginning with her short story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (San Francisco CA: McSweeney’s Books, 2007) to
her memoir on
years of illness, The Two Kinds of Decay
(New York NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). Even while writing about
enormously difficult events and situations, Manguso’s prose projects such a
calmness, fearlessness and clear-headedness, never lapsing into sentiment or wallowing.
Still, The Guardians is a book that doesn’t let the author off the hook
for her friend’s death, despite the impossibility and futility she knows of
such self-blame.

The
Guardians is
a memoir about Sarah Manguso’s relationship to her friend Harris, who committed
suicide by jumping in front of a train in New York, and some of the emotional
aftermath of that act, but is far more than that, just in the way that Ianthe Brautigan’s You Can’t Catch Death (2000) was not merely a book about her
famous father’s suicide. The Guardians also writes about the aftermath
of New York after 9/11, the aftermath of leaving the United States for an
extended period of silence, and what it meant to return home to this death;
this book writes of the agony of home, leaving and hope, the man who would
become the author’s husband, and even incorporates some fragments of one of
Manguso’s self-claimed failed writing projects.

It might have been in an interview, but I recall
hearing Manguso claim that she doesn’t necessarily assign genre to her projects
as she works, thus opening her projects up to become more. Somehow, Manguso
manages books that explore and describe how it is to live in the world, and how
to be better at it, composing passages on love, friendship, illness, suicide,
leaving, intimacy, marriage and death, and the moment of asking her late
friend’s parents permission to even begin. As in all of her works thus far,
this book is about and requires a strict attention. It would be impossible not
to be moved.